Research & Evaluation

Mission

The mission of the Center is to focus on long-standing questions tied to the improvement of public child protective services through applied research. Center research addresses fundamental issues in child protective services and the development of evidence-based policy and practices to effectively address them.

Purpose

Every child deserves a quality, meaningful life with the right to thrive and be happy, including those who, through no fault of their own, become engaged with the child welfare system. With that in mind, the American Humane’s Child Protection Research Center was conceived with the overarching goal of sustained knowledge development that will lead to improved outcomes for children involved in the system.

Among others, the initial areas of focus include assessment and decision-making processes in child welfare cases, examination of the system’s racial disproportionality, improved ways to scale up the implementation of evidence-based intervention and treatment practices at agencies and community service providers, and the further development of a global network of child abuse and neglect data-collection systems and professionals.

Initially, the Center will concentrate on positively improving our understanding of the assessment and decisionmaking process among those involved in ordering actions and providing services to such children. Better decisions made upfront in child welfare cases, and on a continuing basis, will lead to more effective and desirable results for the children in our care, primarily improved safety, health, education, permanency, interpersonal skills, mental health and other important measures of well-being. Further, this effort will ultimately lead to more efficiency and economy in child welfare systems, both in the United States and internationally.

From the perspective of children, the Research Center is their very own advocate helping to ensure that decisions on their behalf, and services provided, are truly in their best interests, with their total well-being as the only possible outcome.

The American Humane Child Protection Research Center is innovative and unique in the following ways:

• It focuses purely on child protective services (CPS).
• It keys on the decision-making process itself, which is foundational to achieving any meaningful, positive results; decisions made by CPS are irreversible and potentially life-changing, requiring carefully thought-out approaches.
• It will also address the nagging issue of racial disproportionality, along with ways to more quickly ramp up and disseminate improved intervention and treatment practices.
• It will take advantage of collective knowledge on a global scale by working internationally, including instigating and leading an effort to better define and compile systematic child-welfare data which, in turn, will provide accurate, relevant and far-reaching information to support the proposed improvements.
• It will provide “real world” solutions and evidence-based policy and practices to long-standing issues in public child protective services.